Oscar-winning filmmaker Guillermo del Toro (“The Shape of Water”) could fill a room with all the unmade projects he’s either developed or has been courted for over the years. Some of those projects include a feature film version of H.P. Lovecraft‘s “At The Mountains of Madness” starring Tom Cruise (A seminal sci-fi horror tale that inspired the likes of “The Thing” and the “Alien” franchise), the sequel to “Pacific Rim,” a series at Marvel/ABC focused on “The Hulk,” and the most infamous being “The Hobbit” movies that passed to Peter Jackson, reluctantly.
Last month, we learned of another big studio project that he was developing with his “Blade II” screenwriter, David S. Goyer, that didn’t get made either. That is a feature film set in “Star Wars” focusing on “the rise and fall” of Jabba The Hutt in the criminal underworld. While del Toro had mused in previous interviews about making a “Godfather”-type story within that universe, it wasn’t until Goyer mentioned that they had actually tried to get it made and had worked on the script at Lucasfilm for it.
Now, del Toro is reflecting on that experience while chatting with Collider at a Q&A that was held this week and isn’t terribly upset about it not really coming together.
“I believe a movie is going to happen when the Blu-Ray comes out, that’s when I know things are going to happen. In the last moment, things go away. I’ve had it happen many many times. We had the rise and fall of Jabba The Hutt. So, I was super happy, and then it’s not my property, it’s not my money. It’s one of those thirty screenplays that goes away. Sometimes I’m bitter, sometimes I’m not. I always turn to my team and say ‘Good practice, guys. Good practice. We designed a great world, we designed great stuff, we learned.’ So, you can never be ungrateful with life. Whatever life sends you there is something to learn from it.”
If you consider what happened within “The Book of Boba Fett,” it might have made a “Jabba The Hutt” project a little redundant as you likely would have seen similar elements. It’ll be interesting to hear if “Fett” got the Jabba thing erased or if they used things developed by del Toro/Goyer in that series produced by Robert Rodriguez. However, given how inventive the Lucasfilm creature shop has been since “The Force Awakens” the potential of an alien creature-focused “Star Wars” movie with del Toro behind feels like such a loss for fans of both “Star Wars” and the filmmaker himself.
Next up for del Toro is a retelling of Mary Shelley‘s “Frankenstein” at Netflix with a cast that consists of Oscar Isaac, Mia Goth, Andrew Garfield, and Christoph Waltz. Filming on that according to the director is aiming to start sometime in February.
Anyway, you can watch del Toro’s thoughts on that experience in video form below.
SOURCE: COLLIDER
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